Denouement (5 page)

Ray stood, reached down, grabbed Dupold by the chest of his shirt, and pulled him farther into the condo.

I stood in front of the neighbors’ house, looking over at the scene. Ed had just arrived in the county coroner’s van. He stood at the doorway of the home, speaking with Rick.

I was holding my phone against my ear, waiting to be connected with Faust. Screeching tires caught my attention from up the block, and I looked over. A black sedan with black windows smoked its tires from the stop sign. The car looked like the same make and model that Agent Hodges had driven when following me around earlier. I’d completely forgotten they had a tail on me though I couldn’t remember having seen him since we’d left Iler’s.

The sedan locked up its brakes in the middle of the street right before me. The driver’s door flew open. A man stepped from the car, but it wasn’t Hodges—it was Faust. He jogged toward the Brumfeld house without giving me as much as a glance. In a flash, he was up the porch and inside.

I clicked End on the phone and dropped it into my pocket as I crossed the street to enter the house. Faust’s voice was loud in the rear bedroom. I headed back.

“Son of a bitch!” Faust yelled. He was crouched next to the body, his back toward me. Faust put a hand through his short dark hair. “Shit!” he yelled. Faust stood and turned. He noticed me standing behind him. He shook his head.

“I was just trying to get a hold of you. His wife said he was an agent. One of yours?” I asked.

“He reports to the Tampa office. Don Brumfeld. Shit!” Faust said again, jerking his head with the word. He rubbed his eyes and held his forehead. “Come on,” he said. Faust headed back through the house and outside.

I followed.

Faust stopped in the driveway. “What do we know?” he asked.

“It looks like a home invasion,” I said.

Faust pursed his lips and shook his head. “Son of a bitch. He was one of the guys meeting with Azarov.”

“Do you think this has something to do with that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You said his wife is here?”

“She’s who found him,” I said.

“Geez,” Faust said. “Where is his wife now?”

“At the neighbors there.” I jerked my chin toward the house across the street.

“Let me move my car. I need to go and talk to her. Find me in a little bit.”

“Okay,” I said. “Um, what’s going on with the scene here? Do you have people coming to take this over?”

“Just have your guys keep doing what they are doing.”

“Okay,” I said.

Faust walked to his car and got in. He drove up the block and pulled onto the grass of the shoulder. He stepped out and crossed the street, headed for the neighbors’.

I walked back inside to talk to Rick and found him in the kitchen next to the table. “What’s it look like?” I asked.

“It looks to me like it all started in here. We don’t have any forced entry on any doors, so no help there. I have a broken coffee cup and spilled coffee all over the kitchen back there.” Rick nodded toward the sink. “Other than the blood in the kitchen here, I have some teeth as well. The beating definitely happened in here.”

“So the homeowner got beat to give up the safe, did, got drug in back and then tied up to a chair from the kitchen?” I asked.

“He probably got tied up here and then carried back while he was still tied to the chair,” Rick said.

A vision flickered in my head, of Ray carrying Callie tied to a barstool while he and his brother had us in the Brewer mansion. “Shit,” I said.

“Shit, what?” Rick asked.

“It’s probably nothing. So the gunshot wounds?”

“Barrel to forehead. There are powder burns around the entry wound. Another shot to the heart. The weapon was a thirty-eight revolver. I found the gun in between the body and the bed. I’m guessing he gave up the combination to the safe, or whatever, and that was it. I’ll see if there are any prints on the firearm.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me know if you come up with anything else, Rick.”

I headed for the front door, exchanged some small talk with Ed for a few minutes, and went to go see what was going on with Faust. He was getting into the driver’s side of his car parked up the block, so I walked down the street toward him. He rolled down the driver’s side window as I approached.

Faust was on the phone. He cupped the mouthpiece and said, “Hop in.”

I rounded the front of the car and took a seat on the passenger side before closing the door.

Faust was holding the phone to his ear. I heard the faint sound of someone answering.

“It’s Faust. Execute the warrants on Project Dollar.”

I gave him a sideways glance.

“Confirmed,” Faust said. He hung up and let out a long breath.

“Project Dollar?” I asked.

He looked over at me. “Code name for an operation I was put on.”

“Yeah, I got that much. Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?”

“I don’t see what difference it makes now. I’m sure it will be in the papers by tomorrow. This kind of thing isn’t usually what I do, but I was asked to oversee it for another division. We have men serving warrants as we speak. The FBI has been working with the Secret Service for over a year to try to squash a multinational counterfeiting ring of superbills. Project Dollar was the name of the operation. We had pieces of the puzzle, but the whole picture didn’t come together until your girlfriend dropped a case of five-hundred-euro bill plates on the FBI’s doorstep.”

“So what is the whole picture?” I asked.

“The FBI had identities of six men, aside from Viktor—four on American soil and two overseas. They were following the old hundreds that Viktor made. The notes were being distributed from Miami to three men inside of Viktor’s organization in the US. The notes would then be shipped overseas to two men in Russia. So the bureau had Viktor and his distributors in the states and his two men receiving the notes in Russia. They were ready to move, and then Callie brings them the case with the euro plates. The whole time, they thought it was just US currency coming straight from Viktor’s operation. Well, after Viktor was in custody and the FBI seized his printing press, they realized the euro plates were a different size. They wouldn’t work with Viktor’s machine. Which left another printing press somewhere. The FBI was stalled. They searched for months with not as much of a sniff as to where the second machine was.”

“I take it Viktor wasn’t talking?”

“No, and then he was killed in prison. They were about to serve the warrants on all the other parties involved to see if someone would talk for a deal when they get word of a mystery man trying to sell contacts for overseas counterfeiting. The talk was that this guy would put you in touch with the best counterfeiter of five-hundred-euro bills in the world for a million bucks. On top of that, the bureau got word that this guy was already up and running. So they started poking around to see if they could get a meeting. The guy in the house, Brumfeld, he was the guy who put the meeting together with this mystery man. Well, we show up, and this guy introduces himself as Ray Marx. Brumfeld introduced my other agent as the buyer. Ray gives us a case filled with samples of the bills to inspect. When we run the prints from the case, we get a pop for Andrei Azarov. The meeting tomorrow was going to be the cash-and-contact exchange. That would have been the final piece that we were missing.”

“Why would Ray be selling off the information? I’d think he’d try to just pick up in his brother’s footsteps,” I said.

“The FBI took everything of Viktor Azarov’s. As far as we know, Andrei Azarov is broke. The machine is gone. The only thing of value he has is the contact.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I want the green light to hunt down Azarov, but if you need the counterfeiter’s name, why not just send in your other agent, who was posing as the buyer?”

“Brumfeld was the contact. Azarov, or someone from his organization, was going to contact Brumfeld this afternoon with a location for the meeting. No contact with Brumfeld, no meeting.”

“What about taking Brumfeld’s phone, waiting for the call to come, and then tracking the incoming number?”

“We tried that when they first made contact with us. Put it this way: it got us nowhere.”

“Why is that? Prepaid phone or something?”

“No. A prepaid phone would be fine. We can still work with that. The person who called Brumfeld was using something that must operate off of the international GSM network. The phone wasn’t equipped with GPS, and the number came back to someplace in Asia. We’ve seen it before. Drug dealers use prepaid phones. Real criminals have evolved beyond that.”

“So ‘no tracking the phone’ is what you’re saying?”

“Correct.”

“And having someone pose as Brumfeld on the phone won’t work because…?”

Faust shook his head. “Look, Kane, I know you’d like Azarov to show up to a specific location at a specific time so we could take him into custody, but I had to make the call. There was too much riding on trying to piece together a last-minute backup plan. Besides, you’ve never heard Brumfeld’s voice. It’s pretty damn distinct. If I put someone else on the phone and the littlest thing didn’t feel right to them, these guys would have scattered. The FBI would have lost a year’s worth of work.”

“Yeah, I get it,” I said. “As far as what we’re dealing with here, do you have any reason to think that Brumfeld’s cover was blown when he met with Azarov? Maybe that is what went down?”

Faust shook his head. “I doubt it. From what I’ve heard, Don had worked countless undercover operations and was always careful. If his true identity ever got out, there would be a line around the block of people wanting to take him out.”

I nodded. “So no meeting?”

“No.”

“What is going on with Azarov, then?”

“He’s yours.”

“So can you take your little babysitter Hodges off of me, then? Speaking of which, where is he?”

“I pulled him after you picked up the cop. I didn’t feel right about having you tailed, and honestly, he’s not quite protection-detail material.”

“Good. Do you have anything on Azarov that can help? At least something to point me in a direction?”

“I’m not sure. We just pulled new phone records on his known associates when we got his identity. I had guys going through them, but nothing led to a location for Azarov. I’d imagine he’s using one of the untraceable phones as well.”

“Was this meeting you were having supposed to be local?”

“It was. Though I don’t imagine Azarov is going to stick around when he gets word that his comrades are in custody.”

“Think I could get those phone records anyway?”

“Yeah, I’ll have someone send them over this afternoon.”

“Appreciate that. Something is better than nothing,” I said. “I have another question.”

“What’s that?” Faust asked.

“Do you think I could talk to the other agent that met with Ray?”

“For?”

“Information. I have a grainy surveillance photo of him. I need more.”

“Yeah, let me call him quick. I need to let him know the meeting is off anyway. One second.”

“Sure,” I said.

Faust punched a number into his phone and held it to his ear.

I heard what sounded like someone answering. Faust clicked his phone on speaker.

“Dupold,” Faust said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“First thing’s first, the meeting is blown.”

“Off? Completely?” Dupold asked.

“Yes, it’s off. The other warrants have been served. Aside from that, shit, I don’t even know how to say this. Um, Brumfeld is dead. We’re not sure what happened here.”

“Dead?”

Faust let out a breath. “Yeah, on the surface, it looks like a home invasion that went south,” Faust said. “I know you guys had your differences, but I just wanted you to know.”

Dupold didn’t respond.

“We can get into that more later.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dupold said. His voice was low and sounded distraught.

“Hey, I have Lieutenant Kane from the TPD here with me. He wants to ask you a few questions about Azarov. Is that okay?”

“Okay,” Dupold said.

“Hello, Agent Dupold. Carl Kane, TPD. I just have a few quick questions on your meeting with Azarov.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

“What kind of shape was he in?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I mean, I put a ton of bullets in this guy. I shot him in the face. Shot him point blank with a fifty cal.”

“He’s walking and talking. He’s an ugly piece of shit though.” He paused. “The side of his face is pink. He’s got a shaved head littered with scars. Crooked nose. He looks like he’s been through the wringer.”

“He didn’t seemed limited at all physically, though?” I asked.

“No.”

“And your meeting tonight was supposed to be local?”

“As far as I know. If you’re going after him, I’d say he’s still in the area. Here. In downtown Tampa.”

“That’s where your first meeting was?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I motioned to Faust that I’d heard enough. I’d just needed to know Ray’s capacity.

Faust clicked the speaker phone off and placed the phone to his ear. “Okay, Dupold. I’m going to head back to HQ in a bit. I need you to come in so we can see where we’re at.”

I heard Dupold respond but couldn’t make out what he said.

“What time can you meet me?” Faust asked.

Another quick response.

Faust immediately clicked off. He slammed the phone into his lap. “Shit!” he said. Faust started the car.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I need to go, Kane. I’ll call you.”

“Okay.” I stepped out of Faust’s car.

He pulled away before I closed the door and sped down the street.

I walked back toward the crime scene. Lowen approached from a neighboring house. He took a few quick steps to catch up to me.

“Did anyone see anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I checked every house on the block. No one saw anything.”

Ray walked back into the main room of the condo. In his right hand was a gold Rolex, and in his left was a thick gold chain and bracelet. Ray stared down at the watch. He tossed the jewelry on the black granite kitchen island next to Dupold. “This fake piece-of-shit watch is what gave you away. It’s the reason why your fed partner is dead. It’s the reason why you soon will join him.”